The Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture, Inc. (ASEC) announces its ninth biennial conference to be held at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, November 3-5, 2022 (with a pre-conference reception on Thursday, November 3rd).

The theme is “Eastern Christianity in New Worlds,” broadly conceived to address the impact on Eastern Christianity of relocation outside its traditional homelands—and its own impact on its new environments (pluralism, globalization). Papers are also welcome that do not explicitly address these topics. This conference seeks to provide a special opportunity for advanced graduate students and recent PhDs to present and workshop their work. Scholars from all disciplines are invited to participate.

Our keynote speaker, Aram G. Sarkisian, is a historian of religion, immigration, and labor in the twentieth-century United States. Blending methodologies of social history and the academic study of religion, his research probes the everyday lived experiences of Russian Orthodox Christians in the industrial United States, exploring how believers’ religious worlds helped them to navigate their neighborhoods and workplaces, the assimilationist pressures of nativism, and the tumults of geopolitical change. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, A Helper and Protector: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1893-1924, which explores how the Russian Orthodox Church built a wide-reaching, transnational network of spiritual and material aid for working-class immigrant believers at the turn of the twentieth century, only for those efforts to be challenged both by the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the United States’ first Red Scare. A native of the Detroit area, he completed his PhD in History at Northwestern University in 2019 and has since taught history at Northwestern, as well as at National Louis University in Chicago.

Dr. Sarkisian will speak on:

“What are you going to do about it?” Excavating Histories of Orthodox Christianity in North America.

Either panel proposals (three papers) or individual paper proposals can be submitted. Send paper and panel proposals with abstracts of 100-200 words for each paper, and a brief one-page curriculum vitae for each participant to Nadia Kizenko (nkizenko@albany.edu). The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2022. 

Limited funding is available to provide graduate students with assistance for travel expenses. Paper presenters must be members of ASEC.

Local conference co-sponsors include the Hilandar Research Library (HRL), the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies (RCMSS), the departments of Classics, History, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and University Libraries. For more information on the conference and its venue, contact HRL curator and RCMSS director Mary-Allen “Pasha” Johnson (hilandar@osu.edu).

Nadieszda Kizenko

Professor of History

Director of Religious Studies

nkizenko@albany.edu